Welcome to my astronomy blog, I dedicate myself to the simplest form of amateur astronomy which requires only portable equipments.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

The Sun by Steele Hill and Michae Carlowicz

I have more time to observe and to write these days, and therefore, other than all the previous topics, I will also start writing about some books that I have on my book shelf. This is the first one of this series.

Being an active solar observer, I really wanted to buy some related books from the first day. However, this kind of books is very limited and some really good and informative books were no longer available. Without too much choices, this is the first one which I bought. I got it from Amazon.

This is not exactly a technical book. You know what, I believe most more technical but still "amateur" books are out of print. This book is not really for active amateur solar observer, but it's more for general public who has interest on the sun.

The content is more like a coffee table book with many excellent photographs. The text is simple and nicely written.

Chapter one is called the Sun King. It talks about how important the sun is to the Earth, along with many excellent photographs related to this topic. Chapter two is called the tricks of light. It's about the atmospheric effect on sun light. Expect beautiful photographs of rainbows, solar halo, sun piller, green flash and their descriptions. Chapter three is called "I'll follow the sun", it's about how people from ancient time to modern days response to the sun. Chapter four is about auroras, to make it short. Chapter five is to look at the sun from the point of view that it is our star. I believe amateur solar observer will interest in this chapter the most. The next chapter is about space weather, i.e. how the sun could affect our life. The final chapter is called "beyond the sun" and you can guess what it's going to discuss about.

After all, it's a very good book to introduce the sun to your friends, or to get you interested about the sun.